Hunt
by brightstarff
Summary: Josephine returns from morning meetings to find something on her desk. One-shot. Fluff. F!Inquisitor/Josephine, F!Lavellan.


_A/N: This is a one-shot awarded to Soraya the All Speaker for winning a challenge earlier. leogrl19's will also be forthcoming sometime in the next couple of weeks._

_I see fics for Christmas, etc., so in the spirit of Easter, here is a somewhat Easter-themed story. Liberties taken with Dalish culture for the purposes of fluff. And yes, there is much fluff ahead...silly and pointless fluff._

_As a side note, I've created a tumblr where you can ask me questions or follow my progress on things. You can find me by searching for brightstarff._

_Enjoy!_

* * *

Josephine is very protective of her desk. She knows where every stray paper is, where every ink stain has faded into the wood, where a tiny number of holes mark frustrated tapping when she can't think of what to write.

So, she notices quickly that someone has touched her things. Her most recent stack of memos have canted slightly to one side and her pen teeters precariously on the far edge, as if having been knocked there.

Her eyes narrow as she attempts to investigate from her doorway. She cautiously assesses the situation before approaching. It occurs to her that there is something else there, something that does not belong. Already, her mind begins to work through a list of likely culprits—a prank from Sera, perhaps with her unlikely accomplice?

(Josephine still pretends she has not forgiven the Inquisitor for their prank, but the look of hesitant mischief on the elves' faces had made her feel a bit relieved instead, even if she was dripping wet and rather uncomfortable. She is glad Lady Lavellan has begun to make friends, and has often worried she is too distant and removed, that perhaps the elf feels out of place in the largely human Skyhold. Still, Josephine's pretended ire has, at least, made Sera cautious about future exploits and evoked a sort of extra kindness from the Inquisitor as reparation.)

Sera would most likely avoid two pranks in a row, so she dismisses Sera as a possibility. (She keeps the Inquisitor in her mind, some silly little part of her hoping she'd been by, that she'd left…something.)

Perhaps it was Leliana, snooping through her things? She dismisses the thought as soon as it comes to mind. Even with Leliana's cultivated cynicism, she doubts her friend would go so far as to believe Josephine has lied to her. The papers do not look disordered, either; merely placed aside by someone attempting to be careful.

Josephine's thoughts are cut short as she sees a flash of color. The sun winks around the edge of a cloud, slanting through the windows at a high angle and illuminating whatever has been placed upon her desk.

It is purple.

Deciding she has assessed the situation well enough from afar, she approaches her desk slowly. She peers over the higher edge and sees—

What appears to be a bird's egg.

It's not like any other she's seen, though; its shell is a vibrant purple color with a few darker spots, and she wonders what sort of creature could possibly lay such a thing. She reaches out to touch it, and it rolls slightly until it hits something else.

A few scattered wildflowers and Antivan candies.

Her brow wrinkles in confusion. While she doubts these…things…are malicious in any way, she's also uncertain what purpose they serve. The flowers might suggest a romantic overture of some sort (a tiny, whispering hope in the back of her mind makes her heartbeat quicken, but she gracefully ignores it). On the other hand, she does not understand why this egg was placed here. Is she supposed to eat it? She picks it up, and it is heavy and pungent in her palm. It has been boiled, but the unique coloring makes her hesitate to peel away the shell.

For a few more moments, she studies the items placed with care on her desk. Her eyes cast about for some sort of note but, seeing none, she simply shakes her head and walks around to her chair. Staring at the flowers will not give her answers, and she has much to do. She places the egg next to her and attempts to ignore it, but as she works, her eyes will wander over to it as it shines innocently in the sunlight.

By the end of the day, she has eaten half the candies, their bright paper wrappers scattered about her desk.

"I'm glad you liked them," a familiar voice says, and she starts. She'd been so absorbed in a memo she hadn't even heard the door.

She looks up to see the Inquisitor standing in the doorway, her face placid as always. Josephine quickly notes, however, the slight fidgeting of her hands at the hem of her tunic.

(Her desk is not the only thing Josephine has memorized at Skyhold, and it is certainly not the only thing she notices.)

"Inquisitor," she says in surprise. "I am afraid I do not—" Then her eyes fall on the paper wrappers. "You…" she begins, but finds her throat suddenly choked by her own nervous heartbeat, which has, somehow, climbed up out of her chest and is threatening to overtake her.

The other woman smiles a bit sheepishly and moves further into the room. "I hope you don't mind," she says. "Your door was left open earlier."

Josephine stares. Her rational, analytical mind has ceased functioning, evaporating into useless, cloudy half-thoughts instead.

Now, the other woman looks uncertain in the weight of the silence between them, and she clears her throat. "It's a Dalish holiday," she says, and Josephine feels both relief and disappointment—relief that the Inquisitor had thought of her, and disappointment that, perhaps, it is customary to give anyone these things on the holiday. Disappointment that Josephine might not be…remarkable…to the Inquisitor.

"I do not mind," the Ambassador replies finally, hoping her voice is even. "It was a pleasant surprise after long morning meetings. But I am afraid I am ignorant of this holiday or the significance of these…" Her eyes glance quickly between the eggs and flowers, not entirely sure if the Inquisitor meant them as a gift. "…items."

In her distraction, Josephine did not notice that the other woman moved next to her. But the air suddenly feels heavy, and she glances up to find Lady Lavellan's face close to hers, so close that she can see the intricate designs fading into pale skin, the sweep of her dramatic cheekbones—so close she can smell cedar faintly—so close that her heart once again chokes her.

(Sometimes, when she is around the Inquisitor, Josephine worries she is going to simply collapse. From what—well, from what she won't admit to herself, exactly, but she suspects it has to do with the way the Inquisitor smiles.)

Light eyes peer into hers from mere inches away, and she hopes that her sudden exhale of breath is not as audible as it seems in her own ears.

"Today," the Inquisitor says, and Josephine swears that the voice has dropped to the humming pitch of the earth itself, and something feels hot and uncomfortable in her chest, "we celebrate Andruil, goddess of the hunt."

Josephine allows herself the weakness of closing her eyes briefly and trying to collect the shattered composure lying just behind her eyelids. She feels a bit like something hunted at the moment, herself, though she is not sure why. It is something in the Inquisitor's voice, something in her eyes, something in the way the other woman seems to track her every movement and breath as she speaks. After a deep inhale, she opens her eyes and quickly glances away, willing herself not to come undone. She studies the odd egg teetering on her desk.

"Hunters must climb to find a hawk's nest and take the eggs," the Inquisitor continues, softly. She has noticed where Josephine's gaze has shifted to. "Then we bring the eggs home and dye them. We hide them among the plants and trees for new hunters to find. The bright colors," she says, picking the egg up, and as her arm brushes Josephine's shoulder, the Ambassador feels her world fracture, "make them easier to find. But some of them are fake, as well—painted rocks—distractions, really. The one who finds the most true eggs, without breaking them, in the time given is crowned with a wreath of flowers for the day."

"Ah," Josephine breathes, thinking she ought to have some sort of more intelligent response, some sort of question, at least, but she is too distracted.

"You've found the first one."

At that, her gaze darts quickly back to the elf, and she sees a look of quiet amusement in those eyes, a twitching smirk just on the corner of her lips.

(Which are quite close, really. Josephine doesn't let herself notice that, of course, but all the same, her skin will remember the whispering heat of the other woman's breath for hours.)

"Pardon, Inquisitor?" she says, blinking any lurking thoughts about lips and breath and cheekbones (_Maker_, her cheekbones) away.

"The first one," the other woman repeats, drawing away to stand up fully, and Josephine blames the sudden chill on the drafty windows. Lady Lavellan holds the egg in front of her, balanced carefully on the tips of two slim fingers.

(No, the desk is certainly not the only thing Josephine has studied often.)

"I am to…find the rest?" Josephine manages around the heart in her throat. She lifts her hand slowly to take the egg, and their fingers brush slightly. She wills herself to breathe. "Who am I…competing with?"

There is silence, and she looks up to find the mischievous confidence vanished. In its place is an adolescent hesitancy, charming on the otherwise angular face.

"I'm afraid your only opponent is the sun," Lady Lavellan replies, looking out the window at the mountains. The snow has begun to turn a soft, pale red in the evening. "No rocks, either, in the interest of time."

Josephine's quick mind turns the words over, and she contracts her brows at the object in her hand. She should say she has more important things to be doing. She should say she has memos to write, meetings to schedule, movements to coordinate, assassinations to prevent. Instead, what comes out of her mouth is, "How many must I find?" And she knows then that she's in trouble, knows as soon as the Inquisitor turns back with a delighted grin, so rare these days after Haven, that she'll never really be able to breathe properly again.

(Josephine doesn't mind, secretly. She feels the lump in her throat is well worth the pleasant warmth in her stomach every time the other woman gifts her with a smile. Josephine wonders if the other woman has trouble breathing, too.)

"Oh," Lady Lavellan says, walking to the front of her desk and leaning over it. Their faces are so close Josephine nearly goes cross-eyed, or maybe that's because she can feel the other woman's breath against her cheek, and she has to stop herself from leaning forward, meeting her partway—"Oh, you'll know when you're done. Trust me," the other woman says, then she stands up (_was that a wink?_) and strides out of the room.

Shaking, Josephine stares blankly at the purple egg sitting in her palm.

"Well," she murmurs to herself. "Well."

* * *

Josephine prides herself for noticing things. Josephine prides herself on her ability to make sense of situations, to quickly observe and act in a way that produces the necessary results.

Josephine, it turns out, makes a decent hunter. Or, at least, a decent egg hunter.

She finds one hidden in her books. (Next to Antivan love poetry, actually, but she pretends she doesn't own them most of the time.) When she journeys out into the main hall, she looks about, considering, one eye on the sinking sun. She considers the throne briefly, but then dismisses it—the Inquisitor takes her judgments too seriously, finds too much pain in them to hide these brightly colored objects there, even in an attempt to trick her. So she thinks for a moment, then briskly strides across the hall.

Leliana watches her with something that might be the shadow of amusement. Not amusement itself—it's rare to see these days in her eyes—but something like it. She teases Josephine, asking if she doesn't have anything better to do than poke her hand in her birds' cages. Josephine simply glares at her, knowing she most likely saw the Inquisitor earlier, and feels triumphant when she eventually pulls out a blue egg with two fingers. She inspects it for stray droppings and, satisfied it's clean, casts about for something to place her multiplying eggs in.

Leliana hands her a basket, and Josephine smiles to herself when a soft chuckle follows her out the door.

When she asks Solas if he's seen any stray eggs about, he gives her a long-suffering look and points to his desk. She picks up a white egg with two distinct elf ears drawn on the sides. For his sake, she waits to laugh until she's far enough away that he won't hear her.

(Josephine supposes his head does look like an egg.)

She walks outside, noting the dimming sky with a slight frown. So far, the Inquisitor has hidden eggs in her companions' typical haunts. But she suspects that those places had particular meanings—eggs would naturally be found in the rookery, and Solas...well, that was a joke by the Inquisitor.

(It makes her heart flutter, a little, to know that Lady Lavellan might want to make her laugh.)

Several minutes later, Sera frowns at her darkly from the corner of the room, grumbling about "elfy things" as she triumphantly discovers an egg hidden under piles of disorganized papers and clothes. A small flower falls out, and she picks it up, placing it with the other eggs. Josephine lets herself laugh a little, this time, having guessed correctly that the Inquisitor would want to bother Sera.

"You do realize she has done this specifically to upset you, yes?" Josephine says, trying to mitigate some future fight between them. Sera merely narrows her eyes at her, and Josephine walks away with the amused exasperation that comes from knowing there will surely be some sort of devastating prank war in the future.

The next egg she finds is hidden next to some carefully hidden books on the Seeker's desk. The title of one makes her blush a little, and she hastily retrieves her prize and retreats before Cassandra returns.

And so Josephine hunts, trying to think like the Inquisitor in one of her playful moods, and only once or twice straying incorrectly (it turns out that Iron Bull was merely drunk, not hiding an egg, after all, and she had had to buy him a replacement drink for having ruined his). Finally, she stands in the main hall again, considering a sky now turned a dusky blue. A few stars have begun to wink at her, and she frowns, truly out of ideas.

Has she found all of the eggs?

Returning to her desk, she finds nothing new and realizes she doesn't know where to meet the Inquisitor once she has finished. She absently rearranges a few papers before sighing, stealing herself for the inevitable admission of defeat. The sun has gone down, and her time is up. Since she doesn't know if she's found them all, she assumes she's missed some crucial clue or hiding place, and makes her way back to the hall.

(She has only been to the Inquisitor's quarters once before, for a languid and pleasant discussion about nobles that surely seemed, in hindsight, odd and petty to the other woman. Still, they had shared laughter, and the memory is a fond one.)

When she reaches the top of the stairs, she finds the door already propped open. Cautiously, she enters into a room lit only by the fire, night having descending in earnest over Thedas.

The room is silent except for the crackle of the wood burning, and she moves in further, looking around the empty space and wondering if the Inquisitor might be elsewhere in the hold.

(She knows without looking, really, that the other woman is not in the room. Her presence always seems heavy and hot, burning brightly in the corners of her eyes. But Josephine sees only the flickering light of the flames.)

A stray burst of light from the fire makes something glint, and she walks forward to the desk in the corner. It takes a moment for her eyes to finish adjusting to the darkness, and when they do, her throat closes in that irritating, aching way it does so often when the Inquisitor's involved.

Placed gently in the center of the desk is the final egg, a brilliant gold color. She wonders how anyone could possibly make a dye that color, and she picks it up gently and places it in her basket. A hastily scrawled note reads, "Congratulations, hunter—bring the crown to the balcony."

Trying to ignore the tremor in her hands, trying to ignore the questions burning in her mind (this was, after all, just a game, a way for them to relax on this rare, peaceful day), she picks up the flower crown and makes her way slowly to the balcony.

(It makes sense, really, for the final egg to be here. Perhaps the Inquisitor understands that Josephine's propriety and strong sense of duty would keep her from entering the elf's quarters without an express invitation.)

A lean figure is leaning against the railing, peering at the silent, snowy giants. Though it is night, the moon lights the snow brilliantly, bathing the elf in an ethereal silver. The image strikes Josephine, and for the first time in a long while, she looks at the other woman and sees something more than mortal, something powerful and bright and still, strong and vast against the tiny dark point of evil that at any other time seemed threatening and overwhelming.

(The image will follow Josephine to the Fade for many nights.)

"Well done," the elf says as she approaches slowly, and when she turns, Josephine sees a dancing mischief in her eyes that lifts their corners slightly, and the supernatural illusion vanishes. Instead, the silvery light envelops them in a cool, dreamlike glow, and she finds herself stepping closer to the other woman without thinking.

(There's nothing to hold Josephine back, here—no duties, no rationality, no fear. Just wants, and the powerful feeling drumming low in her abdomen. For the first time, she allows herself to feel it, allows the silvery light to draw them together.)

Slowly, the Inquisitor takes the crown from her suddenly limp grasp and places it on her head. They stay like that, and Josephine imagines them like a painting, like some old Antivan portrait, unmoving and fantastic, two worlds colliding in one eternal moment, caught forever in the moonlight's glow.

"Have you figured it out, yet?" the Inquisitor asks, breaking the silence, but her voice is so soft Josephine can barely hear it, and she almost wonders if she even spoke because her hands are still on the crown, her head bent just slightly towards her, and Josephine becomes acutely aware of how she's standing. She shifts her hands slightly, but then Lady Lavellan begins to move away in response and she freezes, not wanting the loss of the strange warmth between them. The other woman stops moving as well, perhaps without thinking, merely responding and adapting to Josephine.

"Figured what out?" Josephine's reply is low, and breathy, and if they weren't standing on a balcony with only the mountains for witnesses, if it weren't in the night, she would feel embarrassed. But she doesn't feel like the Ambassador here, doesn't feel any shame in her ridiculous desire to fulfill some of the plots of Cassandra's novels.

(And that's the closest she's ever gotten to admitting it to herself, that her breathlessness, her nervousness around the other woman isn't intimidation or awe or hero worship, or at least not entirely. That it's something more, something heated, something rooted in the nervous heartbeat in her throat. That it _could_ be a romance plot.)

"What you were hunting," is the deep reply, and she wishes she could always hear the Inquisitor's voice like that, low like the earth, low and intimate, just for her (she hopes, she wishes, she thinks).

And it makes sense to Josephine, suddenly—the wildflowers on her desk, the books of Antivan poetry, the birds in the rookery that were really lovebirds when she thinks back on it, the flower in Sera's room, the joke about Solas, the romance novels on Cassandra's desk. All of it leading here.

The final hunt wasn't for the last egg.

It was for the Inquisitor herself.

Josephine wasn't the one being hunted, as she had thought earlier that day. The Inquisitor was asking her to find her, hunt down the fleeting flirtings murmured throughout their past interactions make them reality.

Instead of answering, Josephine leans forward slowly, her eyes still on the other woman's. They are glassy and reflective in the dark, and so she pauses, not sure she can read them correctly.

And then the elf moves in quickly, as if she's unable to stop herself, as if she has been waiting, waiting, waiting, as if Josephine's hesitant little approach was the last straw, the last stone in the dam before the flood burst through.

Josephine's eyes have closed at some point in anticipation, or hope, and she feels the ghost of the other woman's breath across her lips, a haunting little kiss of air, and even that makes her shudder. Even that makes her toes curl on themselves and her hands clench, and she becomes acutely aware of the basket on her arm and the cold breeze at her back in that weightless moment.

Then there are lips on hers, and nothing is cold, and there is no basket, there is only aching, aching for more, for more, for more.

She presses herself into the other woman, trying to keep their touch gentle (because _Maker_ who knew softness could feel so good, who knew passion could also be light and fleeting instead of rough and heavy), but needing the closeness. She feels strong palms frame her face, and she feels her body, embarrassingly, give itself over to the other woman, melting into her, molding against her. Each time their lips move together, close slightly over each other, move against each other, and then away, she feels herself shudder, feels some part of her comes undone, but instead of being afraid, instead of trying to regain composure, she welcomes it.

And when their lips part, and their ragged breathing fills the empty void of the quiet night, the Inquisitor takes her hand and looks at her with a hundred meanings, a hundred unsaid things.

And so Josephine follows her back into the room, and will not realize she dropped her basket of eggs until the next morning when she is in a meeting, and Leliana asks her why there are flower petals in her hair.

(Later, she will place the flowers she collected on her desk, the eggs sadly having become too spoiled to be placed there. She will eventually press them into the love poems of Antiva and, when the Inquisitor leaves on missions, the volumes will sit on her desk, a silent testimony of what she feels, a silent hope for the other woman's safety.)

(Later, the Inquisitor will begin bringing her wildflowers back from each region they visit.)

(Josephine will keep them all.)


End file.
